The letters which follow were written by Gertrude Stein to an obscure, struggling writer named Wendell Wilcox. He had seen Stein’s work in 1926 while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He read a borrowed copy of her book Tender Buttons. Fifteen years later he wrote to her:

“Nothing but deaths,” Edmund Wilson writes in his journals at the beginning of the fifties, when he was haunted by a fantasy that he too might die before his time.

I am face to face with Joseph Stalin in Lodz in 1950. I was then a freshman at the State University of Lodz, a Stalinist school in Stalinist Poland. It was early morning and I was late for an obligatory meeting of a student union.

Janet Flanner, under the pen name of Genêt, began writing her fortnightly "Letter” for The New Yorker in October, 1925, a few months after the magazine was founded.

I was born in South Africa on 9 May 1927. Towards the end of January 1948, I left Cape Town for the last time to join my mother in Paris. As the boat sailed away.

Mrs. Francesca —who never heard of you —got a message from Ouija for me. Nobody’s hands were on it —but hers— and it told us to be married —that we were soul-mates. Theosophists think that two souls are incarnated together— not necessarily at the same time, but are mated —since the time when people were bisexual;

The interest in the feature entitled “China: Literary Happenings,” which appeared in the last issue of The Paris Review, has been such that the magazine has asked Timothy Tung, who collected the material, to put additional questions to Dong Leshan whose short story, "The Topsy-Turvy World of Professor Fu,” was featured. Dong, who is a visiting scholar at Cornell University, had been asked a number of questions about his story and the current state of writing and publishing in today’s China. What follows is an extension to those remarks.

By the late 1940s I knew the blacks had something I was in dire need of, and I was young and intrepid and naive enough to no looking for it.

From 52nd to 140th Street the winds of change were blowing strong. The convulsions of black-rebellion music exploding out of the theaters and cafes of Harlem bad startled white musicians, turned us around; the music was angry, blazing, ferocious—yet always under a tight edge of control.